19th-20th century women in history who exchanged love letters with other women. Many have not lasted due to families choosing to destroy evidence of these letters, while others are merely fragments.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) to Lorena Hickok (1893-1968)
‘Hick my dearest– I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you…’
‘I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.’
‘I can’t kiss you, so I kiss your picture good night and good morning.’
Lorena Hickok to Eleanor Roosevelt
‘I’ve been trying to bring back your face — to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips.’
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) to Edith Wynne Mathison (1875-1955)
excerpt 1; ‘ I will do whatever you tell me to do… Love me, please; I love you. I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything… But never be ‘tolerant,’ or ‘kind.’ And never say to me again — don’t dare to say to me again — ‘Anyway, you can make a trial’ of being friends with you! Because I can’t do things that way… I am conscious only of doing the thing that I love to do — that I have to do — and I have to be your friend.’
excerpt 2; ‘You wrote me a beautiful letter. I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was. I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love… When you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to You.’
Vita Sackville West (1892-1962) to Virginia Woolf (1882-1941):
excerpt 1; ‘It has been a very strange relationship, ours; unhappy at times, happy at others; but unique in its way, and infinitely precious to me and (may I say?) to you. What I like about it is that we always come together again however long the gaps in our meetings may have been. Time seems to make no difference. This is a sort of love letter I suppose. Odd that I should be writing you a love letter after all these years - when we have written so many to each other. Parceque c'etait lui parceque c'etait moit.’
excerpt 2; ‘It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than anyone, and for this alone I love you.’
excerpt 3; ‘I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this –But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it. Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.’
excerpt 4; ‘I wish, in a way, that we could put the clock back a year. I should like to startle you again- even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.’
Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville West:
excerpt 1; ‘Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.’
excerpt 2; ‘I did enjoy seeing you, and am wearing your necklace, and my exuberance after all is not my egotism, but your seduction. Is your garden good?’
excerpt 3; ‘I lie in bed making up stories about you.’
excerpt 4; ‘Shall I come Saturday for the night? Seems the only chance. Let me know… Should you say, if I rang you up to ask, that you were fond of me? If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you-’
excerpt 5; ‘Yesterday morning I was in despair… I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12… But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and it’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind… Shall you mind? Say yes, or no…’
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